The Klan's Favorite Law:

Gun control in the postwar South

By Dave Kopel

Reason.com, February 15, 2005.

If you believe everything that Michael Moore says in Bowling for
Columbine and his books, then you would think that "pro-gun" people
are white racists, and that "gun control" would be a wonderful way to help
minorities. But a look at America's past reveals what historian Clayton
Cramer has accurately called "The
Racist Roots of Gun Control."

After the Civil War, the defeated Southern states aimed to preserve
slavery in fact if not in law. The states enacted Black Codes which barred
the black freedmen from exercising basic civil rights, including the right
to bear arms.
Mississippi's provision was typical: No freedman "shall keep or carry
fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition."

Under the Mississippi law, a person informing the government about
illegal arms possession by a freedman was entitled to receive the
forfeited firearm. Whites were forbidden to give or lend freedman firearms
or knives.

The Special Report of the Anti-Slavery Conference of 1867 complained that freedmen were "forbidden to own or bear firearms and
thus. Rendered defenseless against assaults" by whites. Or as a letter
printed in the Jan. 13, 1866 edition of Harper's Weekly observed:
"The militia of this county have seized every gun found in the hands of
so-called freedmen in this section of the county. They claim that the
Statute Laws of Mississippi do not recognize the Negro as having any right
to carry arms."

Congress' "Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction" set forth
the factual case for the need for a 14th Amendment to protect the
liberties enumerated in the federal Bill of Rights. At the Committee's
hearings, General Rufus Saxon testified that all over the South, whites
were "seizing all fire-arms found in the hands of the freedmen. Such
conduct is in clear and direct violation of their personal rights as
guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, which declares that
'the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.'"

Despite the statutes, and at the suggestion of Reconstruction governors
and other leaders, blacks often formed militias to resist white terrorism.
For example, in June 1867 in Greensboro, Alabama, the police let the
murderer of a black voting registrar escape; in response, a freedman who
would later serve in the Alabama State Legislature urged his fellow
freedmen to create a permanent militia. "Union League" militias were
formed all over central Alabama.

The freedmen slipped from white control. One planter protested that his
workers were "turbulent and disorderly," coming and going when they
wished, as if they had a choice whether or not to work. The Union League,
protested another ex-master, was advising freedmen "to ignore the Southern
white man as much as possible...to set up for themselves."

The next spring, the Ku Klux Klan came to central Alabama. The
Klansmen, unlike the freedmen, had horses, and thus the tactical
advantages of mobility. In a few months, the Klan triumph was complete.
One freedman recalled that the night riders, after reasserting white
control, "took the weapons from might near all the colored people in the
neighborhood."

The same dynamic existed throughout the South. Sometimes militias
consisting of freedmen or Unionists were able to resist the Klan or other
white forces. In places like the South Carolina back-country, where the
blacks were a numerical majority, the black militias kept white terrorists
at bay for long periods.

While many blacks participated in informal, local militias, most of the
reconstruction governors set up official state militias that were racially
integrated. Like many other facets of the reconstruction governments (and
the racist governments which followed them), the integrated "black" state
militias were corrupt. The state militias, which sought to protect the
state governments and the election process, were frequently in conflict
with informal white militias. Arms shipments from the federal government
to arm the militias were often intercepted and seized by white militias.

Official or unofficial, the black militias were the primary target of
the white racist resistance. "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, the U.S. Senate
advocate of racism for many decades, joined a "Sweetwater
Sabre Club" whose members seized control of South Carolina's Edgefield
Country from a black militia in 1874-75, and attacked a black militia at
Hamburg, South Carolina in 1876.

In areas where the black militias lost and the Klan or other white
groups took control, "almost universally the first thing done was to
disarm the negroes and leave them defenseless," wrote Albion Tourgeé in
his 1880 book The Invisible Empire. (An attorney and civil rights
worker from the north, Tourgeé would later represent the civil rights
plaintiff in Plessy
v. Ferguson.)

The Klan's objective in disarming the blacks was to leave them unable
to defend their rights, a Congressional hearing found. Afraid of race war
and retribution, whites were terrified at the mere sight of a black with a
gun. As legal historian
Kermit Hall notes, "From the southern white's point of view, a
well-armed Negro militia was precisely what John Brown had sought to
achieve at Harpers Ferry in 1859."

The
Vicksburg white riot of 1874 typified the problem. According to a
Congressional investigation, the whites conducted, "Unauthorized searches
by self-constituted authority into private homes, searches for arms
converted, as is unusual, into robbery and thieving...." The Congressional
Report detailed one arms roundup:

One poor old man, half crazed, but harmless, sitting quietly in a
neighbor's house, is brutally shot to death in the presence of terrified
women and shrieking children. He gained his wretched living by hunting
and fishing, and had a shot-gun. No one pretended that Tom Bidderman had
anything to do with the fight, but he was black, and had a gun in his
house, and so they murdered him for amusement as they were going from
the city to restore order in the country.

The Radical Republican Congress observed the South with dismay. The
Republicans intended to use federal power to force freedom on the South.
One of the Radical Republicans' most important tools was the 14th
Amendment to the Constitution, which required states to respect basic
human rights. While the vague language of the amendment has produced
disagreement about exactly what is covered, the Congressional backers of
the amendment seem to have intended, at the least, protecting the core
freedoms listed in the national Bill of Rights. Announced Representative
Clarke of Kansas: "I find in the Constitution an article which declared
'the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.'
For myself, I shall insist that the reconstructed rebels of Mississippi
respect the Constitution in their local laws."

The earlier Freedman's Bureau Bill had also been squarely aimed at
protecting the right to bear arms. The bill guaranteed federal protection
of "the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the
security of person and estate, including the constitutional right of
bearing arms."

The Amendment was quickly emasculated by the United States Supreme
Court in
The Slaughter-House Cases and United States v. Cruikshank, The Supreme Court understood the
social realities of the South. The Cruikshank decision gave the
green light to the Klan, unofficial white militias, and other racist
groups to forcibly disarm the freedmen and impose white supremacy.

One state at a time, white racists took control of government by using
armed violence and the threat of violence to control balloting on election
day. Freedmen and their white allies also resorted to arms. But white
Republican governors were usually afraid that employing the black militias
fully would set off an even broader race war.

The white South, while defeated on the battlefield in 1865, had
continued armed resistance to Northern control for over a decade. When the
North, an occupying power, grew weary of the struggle and abandoned its
black and Republican allies in the South, the white South was again the
master of its destiny.

In deference to the Fourteenth Amendment, some states did cloak their
laws in neutral, non-racial terms. For example, the Tennessee legislature
barred the sale
of any handguns except the "Army and Navy model." The ex-Confederate
soldiers already had their high quality "Army and Navy" guns. But
cash-poor freedmen could barely afford lower-cost, simpler firearms not of
the "Army and Navy" quality.
Arkansas enacted a nearly identical law in 1881, and other Southern
states followed suit, including Alabama (1893), Texas (1907), and Virginia
(1925).

As Jim Crow intensified, other Southern states enacted gun registration
and handgun permit laws. Registration came to Mississippi (1906), Georgia
(1913), and North Carolina (1917). Handgun permits were passed in North
Carolina (1917), Missouri (1919), and Arkansas (1923).

As one Florida judge explained, the licensing laws were "passed for the
purpose of disarming the negro laborers... [and] never intended to be
applied to the white population."

That gun control has a very unsavory past does not, in itself, prove
that all modern gun control proposals are a bad idea. But it does offer
reasons to be especially cautious about the dangers of disarming people
who cannot necessarily count on their local government to protect them.

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